Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, shot
by Ellen Kuras, ASC, explores a man's fight to retain his romantic
memories.

by John Pavlus

Unit photography by David Lee

The
plots of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's bizarre movies (Being
John Malkovich, Adaptation) have always defied easy
description. Thus, it might be surprising to some that his latest
tale, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, follows the
universally familiar romantic pattern of "boy meets girl,
boy loses girl" - that is, until the point in the story
where "boy arranges to have all memory of girl erased."

Eternal
Sunshine tells
the tragicomic story of Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate
Winslet), a loving yet hopelessly mismatched couple who, after
breaking up, decide to have their painful memories of each
other permanently removed. Providing this dubious treatment
is Lacuna Inc., whose funky young technicians identify and
delete their clients' troublesome recollections. But when Joel
accidentally becomes lucid during the procedure and begins
to surreally re-experience all of his vivid moments with Clementine,
he realizes he has made a grievous mistake, and struggles to
mentally preserve the remaining details of his bittersweet
love affair.

The
film's director of photography, Ellen Kuras, ASC, notes that
director Michel Gondry, whose acclaimed music videos "often
deal with the morphing of time and space," was ideally suited
to visualize a story whose primary setting is the boundless realm
of its protagonist's memory. However, Gondry was eager to depart
from the hermetic, studio-bound experience he'd had on a previous
Kaufman project, Human Nature. With its slippery shifts between
reality and distorted memories, Eternal Sunshine required a look
that could blend location-shoot authenticity with unpredictable
flashes of whimsy. Kuras, whose own work often strikes a balance
between raw and stylized imagery (notably on Summer of Sam;
see AC June '99) proved a perfect match.

The
cinematographer soon discovered just how challenging it would
be to marry the two halves of Gondry's vision. "Starting
off, he wanted to shoot the entire movie in practical locations,
and he would have preferred me to shoot everything in available
light," says Kuras. "He felt that the more real the
film looked, the more you would believe it when the memories
melted into reality. It was important for him not to get overburdened
by the lighting, which I agree with in theory. But in practice,
you have to be able to light so the camera assistants have a
stop to work with to get the movie in focus! I said, 'Michel,
even on a documentary, I wouldn't shoot exclusively with available
light.'"

But
running parallel to the director's desire for naturalism were
his decidedly "unnatural" ideas for the film's transitions
between reality and memory. "Much of the syntax of the dramatic
action leads you to believe that you're in a memory, or a memory
of a memory, but the reality of where you are in time and space
is not exactly clear," Kuras explains. "One of the
ways Michel wanted to suggest this visually was by calling back
to early cinema, where magicians were using live-action practical
effects in order to change time and space. He didn't want them
to feel or look completely seamless. In one of the scenes, he
wanted me to shake the camera so we could see it was a handheld
effect in camera, as opposed to a locked-off superimposition
effect or double exposure. That was the enigma of the film to
me: we would have these unconventional, trompe l'oeil transitions
that were not transparent film language, but the lighting sources
had to be naturalistic at the same time."

Kuras
and Gondry used most of their six-week prep to determine the
feasibility of these ideas, as well as scout locations in and
around New York City for the wintertime shoot
- "one of the coldest winters on record," Kuras recalls.
Although most of the picture was filmed in practical locations,
the filmmakers knew that some studio work was unavoidable. "We
always had two cameras running, so it was impossible to do some
of these effects [in a practical location] because there wasn't
enough room," says Kuras. Production designer Dan Leigh
recreated key locations - including Joel's Yonkers apartment and an oversized,
1950s-style kitchen from Joel's childhood memories - at a former
U.S. Navy base in New
Jersey.

Eternal
Sunshine was
Kuras and Gondry's first collaboration, and the cinematographer
says that the first three weeks of production were devoted
to developing a lighting strategy that would combine an extensive
use of practicals with a handful of movie lights. "On
the first day of shooting, I wasn't allowed to use any real
movie lights because Michel wanted me to light to eye," she
says. "For a night exterior, for example, I had to clip
some sodium vapors onto telephone poles to augment the existing
sodium vapors. On stage, Michel wanted to recreate the conditions
we had encountered on location. After they'd built Joel's apartment
set, Dan [Leigh] pulled me aside and said, 'All of the ceilings
have been nailed down, so you won't be able to light from above.'
That made me laugh - the last nail in my coffin!"

Complicating
matters further was the fact that two handheld cameras were filming
near-360-degree coverage most of the time. "There were no
marks and very few rehearsals, so we didn't have any kind of
gauge for where the actors would be," recalls Kuras. "Ultimately,
that meant we were lighting the room, not the actors. Sometimes
they were in the key light, and sometimes not. If I knew where
the actors were going to be, I'd try to put something in, but
it wasn't as though we had electricians hanging around with Chimeras
for beauty lights. Although I understood the kind of movie Michel
wanted to make and tried to give him what he wanted, there were
moments when the cinematographer in me just cringed, especially
when the actors danced in each other's key light. In one scene,
when Clementine brings Joel to her apartment for the first time,
we had two cameras covering the scene from start to finish, and
because we were seeing the entire room, I had to use the practical
lamps as the only source of key light; I couldn't get any other
kind of ancillary light low enough to look natural. We ended
up cutting holes in the lampshades and hiding light bulbs around
the set to illuminate the scene. Unfortunately, what happens
in this situation - and what happened in this scene - is that
one actor ends up shadowing the other."

Throughout
the shoot, Kuras and her longtime gaffer, John Nadeau, strove
to jerry-rig units that would provide ample illumination but
would also fly under Gondry's definition of a "film light." Kuras
explains, "We had different assortments of lightbulbs -
refrigerator bulbs, or small bulbs on hand dimmers - that we'd
hide behind furniture or lampshades in order to give ourselves
some stop. In Joel's apartment, we fabricated a light we jokingly
called the 'Mini-Musco,' which was essentially a C-stand with
four clip lights and blackwrap on it. We ended up lighting all
the interiors with either available practicals or those clip
lights, which had 150-, 250- or 500-watt bulbs. It was a game
of hide-and-seek, determining how and where we could hide our
little kit of light bulbs.